” … So I have been using a tool counting back from 5 to 1 in situations where it seems as though I’m afraid or being worrisome.  … I find that when I focus on me in each situation I find so much love and light at the end of each day.” – Jacqueline Habhab

Today’s Full SFZ

 Panic – The Smiths (9:54) 

Our Deepest Fear (our Light) – Marianne Williamson (4:41)

Overcoming Fear & Anxiety Guided Mindfulness Meditation(15:06)  

How would you describe your own “light”?

excerpt from Sister Outsider and a Burst of Light

by Audre Lorde

“And yes, sometimes our daughter and son did pay a price for our insisting
upon the articulation of our differences—political, racial, sexual.
That is difficult for me to say because it hurts to raise your children
knowing they may be sacrificed to your vision, your belief. But as children
of Color, Lesbian parents or no, our children are programmed to be
sacrifices to the vision of white racist profit-oriented sexist homophobic
America, and that we cannot allow. So if we must raise our children to be
warriors rather than cannon fodder, at least let us be very clear in what
war we are fighting and what inevitable shape victory will wear. Then
our children will choose their own battles.

–

Lesbians and Gays of Color and the children of Lesbians and Gays
of Color are in the forefront of every struggle for human dignity in this
country today, and that is not by accident. At the same time, we must
remember when they are children that they are children, and need love,
protection, and direction. From the beginning, Frances and I tried to
teach the children that they each had a right to define herself and himself
and to feel his own and her own feelings. They also had to take responsibility
for the actions which arose out of those feelings. In order
to do this teaching, we had to make sure that Beth and Jonathan had
access to information from which to form those definitions—true information,
no matter how uncomfortable it might be for us. We also had
to provide them with sufficient space within which to feel anger, fear,
rebellion, joy.

We were very lucky to have the love and support of other Lesbians,

most of whom did not have children of their own, but who loved us
and our son and daughter. That support was particularly important at
those times when some apparently insurmountable breach left us feeling
isolated and alone as Lesbian parents. Another source of support
and connection came from other Black women who were raising children
alone. Even so, there were times when it seemed to Frances and me
that we would not survive neighborhood disapproval, a double case of
chickenpox, or escalating teenage rebellion. It is really scary when your
children take what they have learned about self-assertion and nonviolent
power and decide to test it in confrontations with you. But that is a
necessary part of learning themselves, and the primary question is, have
they learned to use it well?

–

Our daughter and son are in their twenties now. They are both
warriors, and the battlefields shift: the war is the same. It stretches from
the brothels of Southeast Asia to the blood-ridden alleys of Capetown
to the incinerated Lesbian in Berlin to Michael Stewart’s purloined eyes
and grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs shot dead in the projects of New
York. It stretches from the classroom where our daughter teaches Black
and Latino third graders to chant, “I am somebody beautiful,” to the
college campus where our son replaced the Stars and Stripes with the
flag of South Africa to protest his school’s refusal to divest. They are in
the process of choosing their own weapons, and no doubt some of those
weapons will feel completely alien to me. Yet I trust them, deeply, because
they were raised to be their own woman, their own man, in struggle, and
in the service of all of our futures.” (pp.  79-80)